AMERICAN MISSIONS.

67

But, doctor, you spoke of our missions abroad. I should like to hear your opinion more at large.

2. You shall have it then, in terms of approbation, and even of laudation, unqualified. I have perused your statistics and your reports, and read your public documents, on the great subject of Foreign Missions, with attention, and for years; and I may say, with increasing advantage and pleasure. The accounts given by your missionaries themselves are quite valuable papers. I read them not only for the narratives they contain, and the facts they declare, and the results they ascertain to us; but for the theology, and the philosophy, and the experimental wisdom included. It is my own opinion that your missionaries abroad are doing a great and a good work; that they are an honor to your country, and a blessing to mankind; and that, for address, industry, sagacity, faith, and practical thrift, they have no equals. At least, I wish the heathen world were full of such missionaries and their appropriate fruits.

1. You deserve, my dear doctor, our grateful recognition, for your liberal and magnanimous appreciation of us in all our best aspects. For one, I thank, esteem, and love you only the more for it. Bad as we are, we have some salt in America; not only Attic salt, but the better salt of the covenant. It is a provocation very legitimate, and very Christian too, in which for you and us to engage together, and with mutual or common profit, if its object be to love and to good works. There are magnific, and swaying, and religious reasons why England and America, the daughter and the mother country, should always maintain a good and an honest understanding together; should foment or provoke no angry or illiberal alienations; should know and pursue their common interests; should respect each other as much as possible, in spite of the faults respectively of both; should in many things co-operate for the good of the world; and, above all, should so think, so speak, and so act, henceforth, as to make another war be

68

AMERICANS GUESS, NOT SO BADLY.

tween them, a thing so tremendous in idea, and so abominated in conduct, as to be hereafter neither tolerable nor possible! Pax inter nos divina esto perpetua, custode Deo, nationes nomine Christianas.

Thus our conversation mainly proceeded, sometimes with intermissions of its gravity and episodes of familiarity and humor. With no reference to his own broad Scotch intonations, he would rally us about our peculiarities. Our vernacular use of the word guess quite amused him. He asked if all the states alike used it, in the sense of suspect or think, and with familiar frequency. I replied, that this usage was more at home in New England, as YANKEE proper, than in the other, and especially the Southern States-though, while at the South they say reckon, they generally guess only; and I while at the North or Northeast, they say guess, they generally reckon only; using the multiplication table more than others, commonly ciphering in their head, and ascertaining results with the certainty of figures, "that can not lie;" while their guesses are announced often with almost oraculous infallibility. Still, our proverbial guessing was rather ridiculous in his view; his amiable daughter, however, took our part in this arraignment.

3. Well, pa, might not this proceed from modesty? They are conscious of their own liability to mistake, and hence they would not assert a thing absolutely; but, in the costume of a simple and modest guess, they suggest and introduce it to our thoughts. We, I am sure, are more dogmatical, " you know." We always assert not only, but, "you know," we tell the hearers presumptuously that they know the same, "you know." In this, perhaps, our own is a peculiarity much more objectionable, as really arrogant and often false. Sometimes, when one is telling us marvels, "you know," that we never heard or thought before, he will keep interrupting his own thoughts and ours, by saying, when he asserts a wonder,

OUR READING NOT INFERIOR.

69

"you know," though we know properly no such thing, and possibly he may not know it either, " you know!"

I followed suit, by remarking that the dialects of ancient Greece were neither so variant, nor so bad as those of the different districts, and even related counties, of the British isles; and that for general correctness and homogeneousness too, the English language flourished in America, among the commonly-educated classes, with quite remarkable, and even with increasing uniformity, throughout the whole country and all the states. But the British are often prejudiced, in this respect more innocently than in some others, it may be, against us. So Dr. Johnson was set against the Scotch-but more, they say, against the intellectual character of America, especially after the Revolution; of whom it is related that once, in conversation with an honored and excellent American, the latter spoke of purchasing, as desired, a quantity of books, while in London, to stock the private libraries of a few of his friends and neighbors at home; when Johnson interposed with an ill-natured remark about the low state of American literature and cultivation, as if any thing was good enough for their reading and improvement. The Americanț replied, True, indeed, you have more age and more maturity than my countrymen; but neither are your minds at all superior to ours, nor is our proficiency as low as you commonly rate us. We read the works of Addison, Pope, Young, Milton, Shakspeare. The Spectator, the Rambler, Rasselas especially, are great favorites with our readers. And it is be

* He died shortly after the peace, December 13, 1784.

+ Rev. John S. Ewing, D.D. LL.D. Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, and pastor of the First Presbyterian church, Philadelphia; a rich and a ripe scholar, a finished gentleman, and one of whom that surly English eater of beef-steaks, and testy old colossus of literary erudition, and morose defender of church and state establishments, and superstitious propugnator of monarchy and every thing English, ought in all decency and justice to have been more considerate and respectful.

70

OUR EVILS AND OUR DANGERS.

cause they have read these so much, that they need and ask for more of the same, and even of higher character-if London can afford them to us! The doctor was wonder-struck, and quite improved in his huge urbanity and his estimate of the American capabilities—especially if the Rambler and Rasselas were favorites with their common readers, as they were certainly with himself!

To some of the questions of Chalmers, about the stability of American society and our republican form of government, I answered as far as honestly I could in their general vindication. At the same time, I owned our incidental evils, our dangers, and our fears-sectional jealousies; sordid ambition; demagogism; party spirit; flattering the people for their votes; the silly and the shameful idolatry of military chieftainship-rather of military success and hero-worship, so that no matter who he is in other respects, if he is a conspicuous general, sees actual service, and gets a victory, he meets the collaudation of the continent, and is always in actual danger of being made, on that account mainly, if not solely, President of the United States. There are also the mischiefs of contempt for age and office; boys and girls anticipating maturity of life, and arrogating more than all its honors in their upstart and impious vanity; others leveling downward; a spirit of giddy restlessness in some places; slavery and its affinities; popery and its corporation of falsehoods; residuary intemperance; Sabbath-breach; infidelity; insubordination, in some few instances, even to the sacredness of law; the selfish love of liberty, or that against order and the rights of others; defective education; papal immigration and imported licentiousness; false equality; predominating ignorance in particular localities; national vanity ; and, above all, national sins of every kind against God; these and such as these might, each or all of them, be commissioned to work our punishment, and execute his wrath, even in our national dismemberment and ultimate destruction.

In reference to our system of education, from primary schools to the ultimate honors of ALMA MATER and the Professional Gymnasium, I made as favorable replies as in conscience I could, to his searching, and yet bland and pertinent interrogatories. Our system as peculiar, as properly and really American, I endeavored to expound and vindicate-from the nature of the case; from the extent as well as the recency of our country; from our sparse and industrious population; from the wants and the necessities of our emigrating fathers; from their noble history and puritan principles; from the late multitudes of Europe's poor and ignorant population coming among us by uncounted thousands; and from other and incidental causes allied to these. As to our deficiencies, I insisted that, as a boy of seven years old could not compete so well at school with one thrice seven, so we ought to be credited, too, in proportion to our comparative infancy, for the really gigantic achievements and attainments we have made; that some of our acknowledged and characteristic qualities as earnest and original thinkers, and as inventors, were not deficiencies; that some of their own specimens were less a decus than a dedecus to their proud and aristocratic educacation, so vaunted, at Oxford, at Cambridge, or even at their Athens of the North; that many of their University graduates were merely factitious scholars, who "eat their terms" at college, and then, by the aid less of grammars than of crammers, they prepare ad literam for the examen of "the little go," and also, in the same way, of "the great go," each of them, or, at least, one here and there, now and then, haud rari, and as certain also of their own poets have said,

Proceeding soon a graduated dunce.

Now, if some of our graduates are stamped at the mint of the University B.A. or even A.M. or possibly D.P. or M.D. or LL.D. or, horresco referens, even D.D. rather immaturely, one here and there, now and then, glorying in the degree sincerely, and taking his DIPLOMA by faith-not being able, exactly or analytically, to translate its Latin mysteries-yet